Make way for those who follow their path.
(…)
Make way and don’t say anything to them.
Make way for they are merely going to
Drink the Dream water from some fountain
(…)
Miguel Torga, “Santo e Senha”

ErasmusThe first one, an important personality of the
Renaissance, a scholar and traveller, fought for dialogue in a time of
theological disputes and religious intolerance.
The second one celebrates the 25th anniversary and is “Santo-e-Senha” of
a community of nearly three million people, spread across Europe, united by the
identity ties of a time when the stage of life has moved from the country where
it was born, to Europe. And from here, to the world. New explorers whose
luggage comes down to the urge to part and learn, challenge homesickness and
see there, what the television showed here, now with tastes and smells, sounds
and textures and a palette of feelings whose colours time will not erase.
One parts in search of another, which in the end is finding oneself.
Why does one often part alone? Because one guesses a destination made of
fortunes and adventures, seen from the couch back home; they do not anticipate
the discomforts of travel, the need to develop capabilities hitherto
unsuspected and minor, how to decide what and how to cook. The confrontation
with different people, speakers of other languages, makes communication the
first oddity.
Then the enchantment, a world that opens up to the exploration of the senses
and intellect keen to know a culture, often so different from their own, a
fascination that seizes those who so recently felt the hardship of
homesickness.
On the curves of the road arise adversity, loneliness, being with someone you
don’t know. You face the building of trust. You discover a new space and time
in the mysteries of another language that unfolds in the exchange of affections
that are woven, and, in that revelation, shady glimpses of the mother-tongue
are perceived, which are so intimate that one would think they had no secrets.
Singularities of the place you left, deemed attributes of some silent
parochialism for its modesty, they appear, by comparison, tinted by the colours
of the identity of the people to which one belongs and enshrine in the soul
with the tenderness with which one displays pictures of family and friends.
The new “me” is now the bearer of a cultural identity different from that in
which (s)he immersed, but just as legitimate as it. A Citizen of Europe, a
bigger project, a quilt of different colourful patchwork that one wishes to be
interwoven with the threads of social cohesion, solidarity and tolerance based
on the recognition of oneself in others and not in complacency or subservience.
In return, the transfiguration. The new “me” retraces the path that led him/her
further: more secure and confident, resilient. Behind lies a time of joys and
cries, of questioning and reconstruction, of teachings about genuine autonomy.
Ahead? Curiosity, restlessness, a taste for the new that is never fully
satiated. The revelation of oneself, of the unity of a being in a global world,
becomes the lens through which to read the events of existence. An existence
unavailable to limit the now discovered freedom of being what one is, having
(re)discovered oneself in the eyes of another. An existence that projects a
future in love with the unknown that is not feared, equipped with the boldness
of those who went and thus reinvented themselves and therefore know that they
will leave, time and again, in the certainty that like so they will be more
whole.